Worldwide point-of-sale (POS) locations with electronic cash registers (ECRs) number an estimated seventeen million, eight million of which are in the United States. Retail POS sites account for two million of these locations, and the remaining six million are located in commercial banks, insurance agencies, hospitals, hotels, health-care providers, health clubs, etc. Approximately 300,000 are located in supermarket-like environments.
Estimates of the time a consumer typically spends at various point-of-sale/service (POS) platforms range from 30 seconds at convenience stores to 3.5 minutes at supermarkets. Assuming an average of 30 visits per day for the typical supermarket POS, such visits represent 9 million individuals per day captured at POS platforms for 3.5 minutes each time in the U.S.
Assuming four impressions per transaction and an average cost-of-media-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) rate of $10, a typical supermarket POS platform represents 120 impressions a day, for a value of $1.20. In the aggregate, the 300,000 U.S. supermarket POS platforms represent 36 million impressions in one day, for a value of nearly $130 million annually.
The opportunity of 36 million daily impressions may easily be squandered. Where the advertisements displayed at a POS location are random or at least uncoordinated with the transaction occurring at the POS, the advertising value of the impression may be substantially diminished or even lost completely.
Accordingly, it is desirable to use criteria of a transaction to determine what advertisement is displayed at the transacting POS location.
Also, it is desirable to coordinate the display of advertisement with the progress or stage of the transaction.
These and other goals of the invention will be readily apparent to one of skill in the art on reading the background above and the description below.